SOURCE: “The Merry Wives of Windsor: Classical and Italian Intertexts,” in Comparative Drama, Vol. 27, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 364-76.

[In the following essay, Miola asserts that despite its weaknesses in plot, The Merry Wives of Windsor reveals Shakespeare's skill at adapting comedic forms outside of English dramaturgy.]

Current theory has distinguished between two opposite intertextual perspectives, synchronic and diachronic. Dismissing all notion of temporality and hence of sources, the synchronic perspective views all texts as existing simultaneously with each other. “An endless ars combinatoria takes place in what has been variously termed ‘musée imaginaire’ (Malraux), ‘chambre d'échos’ (Barthes), or ‘Bibliothèque générale’ (Grivel).” Contrarily, the diachronic perspective recognizes temporality and thus constructs well-ordered “archives” (Foucault) of intertextuality that meticulously chronicle “every code and register its continuities and discontinuities.”¹ The latter perspective opposes the former's endless Derridean deferral and dispersion, that kind of detheologized hermeticism in which all signifiers ultimately signify nothing. It enables criticism by affording more spacious perspectives—perspectives which stretch beyond the familiar landscapes and delusory comforts of verbal echo and the parallel passage to newer vistas composed of ancient and evolving topoi, conventions, and traditions.²

Mapping these vistas in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor begins with recognition of its New Comedic substrata. Wives draws on the braggart soldiers of Miles Gloriosus and Eunuchus and on enormously popular descendant traditions. Moreover, the play, fluently recombining other New Comedic themes, motifs, and characters, draws on configurations and conventions originating in Plautus' Casina.³ Though R.S. Forsythe overstated the case, he set forth persuasive evidence for this influence, well observing that both Casina and Wives feature a husband and wife who support different suitors to a young girl, that this girl loves a third person and eventually marries him, that both sets of wives similarly conspire against a foolish husband, that both dramas work to the climax of a mock-wedding in which the bride is discovered to be a male. Here we need not succumb to the fallacy of misplaced specification to recognize important affinities.

In Wives, as elsewhere, Shakespeare arranges the New Comedic elements in Italian style.⁴ Oscar James Campbell notes the Italianate triple wooing of Anne Page and observes the pedante in Falstaff and Sir Hugh Evans, the zanni in the Host, the medico in Dr. Caius, and the fantesca in Mistress Quickly. Leo Salingar remarks Shakespeare's use of the Italianate double plot “with its confusions of identity and crossed complications,” his preference for multiple marriages and subordinate deceptions (like beffe), and concludes: “paradoxically, the play in which he comes nearest to a wholesale adoption of Italian methods and an Italian manner is The Merry Wives of Windsor, his only comedy set in England.”⁵

These observations suggest an approach that can justly evaluate Shakespeare's wide-ranging eclecticism in this play and assess its complex topography. The central alazon, Falstaff, descendant of Pyrgopolynices and Thraso, resides in a world created by Italian dramatists. The Merry Wives of Windsor belongs specifically to that family of plays that adapt Casina, mixing in other contemporary and classical elements, often a braggart soldier. Beatrice M. Corrigan first noted the common elements and variations in this group of plays—Machiavelli's Clizia (1525), Berrardo's La Cassina (1530), which is a translation of Plautus, Dolce's Il Ragazzo (c.1541), Della Porta's La Fantesca, Lanci's La Ruchetta (1584), Cecchi's I Rivali, and the anonymous and unpublished Sienese Il Capriccio (1566-68).⁶ To this list we may also add a descendant of Clizia, Gelli's Lo Errore (1556). Offering a wide range of dramatic and interpretive possibilities, these plays represent a related series of ingenious adaptations rather than a coherent group; together they gather contemporary responses to a seminal classical play and present a lexicon of theatrical possibilities. Shakespeare need not have studied this lexicon directly to have picked up the language; in this regard traditions speak much louder and longer than individual texts. Shakespeare's reworking of Casina, The Merry Wives of Windsor, freely recombines all the important constituent elements of the Italian versions: the emphasis on jealousy, sometimes embodied in a scheming wife; a ridiculous senex amans; a boasting soldier; romantic young lovers; and, the signature motif, a male disguised as a bride. (There are also echoes in Wives of other Italian innovations—an impudent boy and a Latin-speaking pedante.) Wives arranges the standard elements into new configurations: the jealousy appears in the husband Ford, not the wife, and motivates a parallel action; the wife becomes the merry wives who control the major intrigues of the play, a transformation that recovers the original dynamic of Casina. The senex amans and miles gloriosus, along with various other medieval and classical figures, conjoin in the stuffed figure of Falstaff. Eros turns into romance Italian style: the lusty adulescens becomes the loving Fenton, the silent and absent Casina, the winsome Anne Page. The boy disguised as a bride, doubled, provides a climax to a subordinate plot and accompanies the other humiliating exposures in the play. Shakespeare brilliantly redefines and rearranges traditional elements to create an English comedy that is, paradoxically, both classical and Italianate as well.

Annotating Plautus' Casina, Lodovico Castelvetro suggested that the son's love affair was “senza niun valore, che bastava che la moglie si fosse aveduta, che il marito fosse inamorato della serva” (“without value; it was sufficient that the wife be jealous and the husband be in love with the servant”).⁷ Castelvetro's identification of jealousy as an essential plot element echoes in the Italian adaptations, which often portray this passion. Della Porta's La Fantesca, for example, features Jealousy as the prologue, and this passion motivates the major actions of the play. Transferring the jealousy from the wife to Ford, Shakespeare depicts it as another form of the alazoneia that overestimates the self and underestimates a woman. The wives' battle against the tendency to reduce them to sexual objects, possessions carefully guarded but easily stolen, has actually two fronts, one without and one within Windsor; Falstaff's noisy narcissism finds reflection in Ford's obsessive jealousy. Like a braggart soldier, Ford congratulates himself on his own percipience and vigilance: “God be prais'd for my jealousy!” (II.ii.309). He mocks the trusting Page as “an ass, a secure ass” (ll. 300-01), and delights in his own invention, his plot to expose his wife, whom he misprizes as “a false woman” (l. 292).

Ford's jealousy motivates a subordinate action that mirrors the main action of Casina—namely, the exposure of a foolish husband by a smart wife. To portray Ford's folly, Shakespeare reverts to his earliest experiment with Plautus, The Comedy of Errors. Like Antipholus of Syracuse who wonders whether he is “Sleeping or waking, mad or well-advis'd” (II.ii.213), Ford ponders his state, “Hum! ha? Is this a vision? Is this a dream? Do I sleep? Master Ford, awake!” (III.v.139-40). Here Plautine bewilderment results not from the simple error of mistaken identity but from more complex misjudgment of his wife and self. Moreover, like the other twin, Antipholus of Ephesus (III.i), Ford angrily storms his house in the company of restraining friends (III.ii-iii, IV.ii). And both times he, like the town twin, leaves dissatisfied, convinced that his wife has been unfaithful. This scenario, deriving ultimately from Amphitruo, occurs also in Ado, when Claudio and Don Pedro spy on Hero's supposed rendezvous. Here Shakespeare works a new variation on the dramatic situation, this time portraying the jealous husband as a complementary fool to the braggart soldier-lover. (Jonson uses essentially the same strategy with Kitely and Bobadill in Every Man In His Humor, a play in which Shakespeare acted.) In contradistinction to Falstaff, however, Ford moves from ostentatious self-love to the humble trust of another in marriage, a progress that recalls similar developments in Errors, Shrew, and Ado. Ford repents in verse, in lines dignified and convincing:

Pardon me, wife, henceforth do what thou wilt.
I rather will suspect the sun with cold
Than thee with wantonness. Now doth thy honor stand,
In him that was of late an heretic,
As firm as faith.

(IV.iv.6-10)

Together husband and wife plan the final exposure of the other alazon, Falstaff, appropriately bedecked in horns.

Shakespeare's striking transformation of the classical matrona into Mrs. Page and Mrs. Ford has rarely been noted or appreciated. Though these wives differ markedly from their unchaste counterparts in the novella tales frequently adduced as sources, critics have been reluctant to consider classical precedents. Most, subscribing too closely to the notion of stock characters, have in fact seen the wives as anti-classical; witness, for example, Ruth Nevo: “Shakespeare's New Comedy inverts traditional feminine roles, thus transforming a male-oriented, male-dominated perspective into its antithetical opposite.”⁸ Such a generalization, though commonly held, ignores the demonstrable diversity of women and their roles in New Comedy, not to mention the dominating females of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, Ecclesiazusae, and Thesmophoriazusae. Plautus and Terence depict the chaste and virtuous matrona Alcumena (Amphitruo) as well as the virago Artemona (Asinaria). Sostrata, instead of scolding her husband, gets scolded by him and is wrongly held responsible for her son's problems throughout Hecyra. And, of course, we need look no further than Casina itself to find precedent for Shakespeare's merry wives. As Walter E. Forehand has shown, Plautus presents here Cleustrata, a highly individualized matrona who outmaneuvers her husband through clever tricks.⁹

It is a long way from Cleustrata to Mistress Ford, but some of the distance had already been traveled by Italians. The two playwrights who follow Casina most closely, Lanci and Machiavelli, expand the roles and characters of the matrona. In the conclusion of La Ruchetta Cassandra pardons her erring husband at the request of her friend Gostanza (“Horsu Cassandra perdonategli per amor mio”); the husband gratefully responds, “Non credo che sia al mondo huomo, che habbia la piu piaceuol moglie della mia” (“I don't think there is a man in all the world who has a more pleasing wife than mine”). Recognizing her long-lost daughter, Ruchetta, Gostanza exclaims: “Oh Cassandra quanto giubilo, quanta allegrezza ho io?”¹⁰ Discussing Clizia, Radcliff-Umstead notes the major changes in Machiavelli's portraiture:

Whereas Plautus' Cleostrata is always finding fault with husband, insulting him at every occasion, Sofronia attacks Nicomaco only because of his failure to preserve the dignity of his age and because of the bad example he has set for his son. Sofronia is never jealous; Cleostrata is jealous even when there is no cause. … Cleostrata forgives her husband only because of the technical necessity of ending the comedy, but Sofronia pardons her husband because of her affection for him. All the efforts of the wife in Machiavelli's play are made to shock Nicomaco out of his amorous madness; Sofronia has to use brutal means to wake him from his dream of sensual delight. When he surrenders, she is ready to forget everything. Machiavelli has depicted this woman as a thoughtful and loving wife.¹¹

In Gelli's reworking of this play, Lo Errore, Mona Francesca likewise humiliates her husband, then grants him forgiveness but not before she forces him to agree to their son's marriage. Mrs. Ford makes one with this good company of women: all defend themselves and their marriages from the crazed passion of the husband; all use for a principal weapon a remarkable astuzia; and in the end, all are loving and forgiving wives in reconstituted partnerships.

Falstaff too embodies and transforms New Comedic and Italian characters, expanding them well beyond the boundaries, however spacious, of any single type.¹² Primarily, he is a miles gloriosus, that boasting soldier/lover who descends from Euripides' Herakles, Aristophanes' Lamakhos and Dionysos, down through Menander's soldiers and those of Plautus and Terence, through Italian and English ancestors as well.¹³ Here too he resembles the familiar senex amans, the old man who presumes to be a lover but is found to be “Old, cold, wither'd, and of intolerable entrails” (V.v.153-54). These two classical types were traditional targets of much Italian comedy, including those plays descending from Casina (Della Porta's La Fantesca features two braggarts, Capitano Dante and Capitano Pantaleone). Freely adding other types and traditions, Shakespeare combines them into one enormous figure, drawing all into coherence by the fat rogue's “admirable dexterity of wit” (IV.v.117-18).¹⁴ In his mixed ancestry Falstaff resembles Molière's great comic creation Harpagon of L'Avare, direct descendant of Plautus' miserly Euclio, simultaneously the senex amans in rivalry with his son and the blocking father who opposes his daughter's marital plans.

Falstaff's military braggadocio appears throughout the play. He woos like a “soldier” in “soldier-like phrase” (II.i.11-13); he promises to stare Ford “out of his wits” (II.ii.279), thus boasting of the basilisk eye that was stock weaponry in the braggart's arsenal; he threatens to awe Ford with the cudgel: “it shall hang like a meteor o'er the cuckold's horns” (ll. 280-81). Moreover, both Miles Gloriosus and Wives use the conventional dialogue with the parasite to reveal the vanity of the boasting soldier. The importance and flexibility of this pairing, first appearing in Greek Middle comedy, is amply attested by Francesco Andreini's collection of commedia dell'arte dialogues between Capitano Spavento and Trappola.¹⁵ In Plautus' Miles Gloriosus Pyrgopolynices converses with his parasite Artotrogus; Falstaff converses with the equivalents—Pistol, Nym, and Bardolph. There are, however, important dissimilarities in presentation. The classical boaster usually has his illusions fed by a wily parasite who encourages him for selfish purposes, ridicules him in asides, and gleefully plots the final puncturing of the balloon. In I.iii Falstaff himself fantasizes about Mrs. Ford's “leer of invitation” and Mrs. Page's “judicious iliads” (ll. 45-46, 60-61), expounding the dream of his own sexual attractiveness that motivates the entire action. He is as vain as Pyrgopolynices but needs no flatterer to puff him up. Falstaff feeds his own illusions as well as his own belly. His attendants, far from inflating the foolish fantasy, seek to deflate it:

Falstaff:
… sometimes the beam of her view gilded my foot, sometimes my
portly belly.
Pistol:
Then did the sun on dunghill shine.
Nym:
I thank thee for that humor.

(ll. 61-64)

Pistol and Nym indignantly refuse to bear Falstaff's letters to the ladies. Whereas Pyrgopolynices sees himself by reflection, by the false images that others are only too happy to provide, Falstaff creates his own self-image and acts accordingly. This invention, of course, argues a kind of wit in Falstaff, a poetic fancy that sets him apart from the merely gullible and stupid prototypes. But this difference also isolates the fat knight in his illusions and makes him solely responsible for his folly as well as its consequences.

In classical and neoclassical plays the comeuppance begins with the boaster's entrance into the lady's house. Plautus' Milphidippa assures Pyrgopolynices that the husband will be absent (l. 1277). Mistress Quickly twice tells Falstaff that the husband will be out and that Mrs. Ford awaits him (II.ii.83-84, III.v.44-46). We recall the humorous stage play and resonant symbolism of the locked door in Amphitruo and Menaechmi, and in Errors, Twelfth Night, and Ado, as Shakespeare stages two variations of the device here. Twice entering the woman's house, twice unlocking the locked door, Falstaff reenacts the other entrances, real and feigned, in full expectation of the sexual reward. Like Plautus' courtesans, the merry wives, however, have wittily revised the New Comedic script. He who fancied himself a sexual imperialist, an extravagant voyager in love, trading with the East and West Indies of Windsor wives (I.iii.71-72), gets locked in a laundry basket and, the second time, beaten in women's clothes. The ignominious adventure in the suffocating and odorous laundry basket has some precedent in Il Pecorone and other novella tales, but similar enclosures regularly extinguish the ardors of foolish lovers in neoclassical comedy: the senex amans in Piccolomini's Alessandro gets locked in a bathroom (“in quella camera del necessario”) where he suffers from the horrendous stench (“il puzzo horrendo”);¹⁶ the scene changes to a coal-house in Chapman's May Day, his adaptation of Alessandro; in La Calandria the amorous old fool gets stuffed into a large trunk that is about to be dumped in a river; and in Les Fourberies de Scapin the wily servant tricks Géronte into a sack and then beats him.

The conflation of martial and amorous ardors evident in Falstaff clearly shows the twin delusions rampant in Windsor—the overestimation of the self as a soldier for all seasons, and the underestimation of the woman, here reduced to the status of a military objective, a thing to be lost or won. Dr. Caius, another “Hector” (II.iii.33), presents an extreme and illuminating case of both delusions. He woos Anne arrogantly and ineffectually with his sword, mistaking his competition (he seems to be unaware of Fenton), misdirected to the duel, that Italian innovation which here, as in Twelfth Night, exposes the folly, usually cowardice, of the braggart. Dr. Caius works through agents like Mrs. Page and Mistress Quickly, and does not once speak directly to Anne in the play. Consequently he is perpetually in the wrong place at the wrong time. His fortunes, running through swaggering folly to public humiliation, clearly mirror Falstaff's progress from Windsor boaster to country gull.

Opposed to these military lovers in the play is the young Fenton. Shakespeare's transformation of the absent youths of Casina into young lovers perfectly accords with Italian theory and practice. Castelvetro, as we have seen, thought the classical lovers extraneous. Italian playwrights expanded their roles and integrated them into the action, as did later adaptors, including John Dennis, who made “everything Instrumental to Fenton's Marriage,” as well as Boito and Verdi in their opera.¹⁷ With regard to the Italian plays Beatrice Corrigan has observed: “the characters who assume paramount importance in the Renaissance versions are precisely those of the young lovers, particularly of the men.”¹⁸ Similarly adapted is Shakespeare's adulescens, Fenton, who also resembles a Chaucerian “clerk”: “He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth; he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May” (III.ii.67-69). Unlike the others in the play, Fenton actually woos the lady in person and, though rejected by her father, shows faith in her, “Why, thou must be thyself” (III.iv.3). He does not see Anne as a military objective or as merchandise to be fought for or bargained over—the prevalent attitude typified, for example, by Evans: “Seven hundred pounds, and possibilities, is goot gifts” (I.i.65). He pointedly disavows materialistic motives in the wooing, stung by Mr. Page's accusation that he views Anne “but as a property”:

No, heaven so speed me in my time to come!
Albeit I will confess thy father's wealth
Was the first motive that I woo'd thee, Anne;
Yet wooing thee, I found thee of more value
Than stamps in gold, or sums in sealed bags;
And 'tis the very riches of thyself
That now I aim at.

(III.iv.12-18)

Fenton's use of a military metaphor later in this scene—his promise to “advance the colors” of his love “against all checks, rebukes, and manners” (III.iv.80-81)—measures the difference between him and the other suitors. War is a mere metaphor for the hostile circumstances and for his own steadfast persistence. He doesn't actually boast of soldierly prowess, woo with the sword, or consider Anne a military prize. Instead, he takes the trouble to win her heart and sends a ring (III.iv.100). The letter he receives from her later, a direct contrast to the presumptuous epistles of Falstaff, “mutually” answers affection (IV.vi.10); together Fenton and Anne plot to outwit parents and foolish suitors. Those who come to wive by swaggering, in Windsor as in Illyria, never thrive.

Similarly, the silent and absent virgo becomes Anne Page, a transformation well prepared by the Italians. Corrigan observes similar changes in Machiavelli's Clizia, still absent but good and beautiful, Dolce's Livia, a “gentildonna fanciulla” who reciprocates love, in Cecchi's Persilia, who appears briefly on stage, and in Lanci's Ruchetta, who asks for time to find her parents (with the help of il cielo) before beginning an undesired marriage. Berrardo's translation of Casina expanded the virgo's role and, according to Jean Braybrook, encouraged the fuller portrayal of Antoinette in yet another adaptation, Belleau's La Reconnue.¹⁹ Shakespeare continues the trend with Anne Page, who, like his other virgines Bianca and Hero, has more stage presence than her small part suggests and than many commentators allow. Anne tolerates the idiotic Slender with kindliness and grace; she protests vigorously against her mother's choice, Dr. Caius: “Alas, I had rather be set quick i' th' earth, / And bowl'd to death with turnips!” (III.iv.86-87); going Ruchetta one better, she chooses and plays her role in the final marital pageant.

This pageant features the substitution of boys for brides, a multiplied replay of Chalinus' imposture in Casina. Plautus plays this substitution for bawdy slapstick as the chagrined lover gets his comeuppance.²⁰ Machiavelli, Dolce, and Lanci follow suit, reprising the raucous tone and genital humor. There were other interesting variations: in La Fantesca there is no girl at all but a boy, Essandro, in disguise throughout the play; and in Aretino's Il Marescalco the duped suitor, preferring men to women, is delighted with the trick. Jonson's adaptation, Epicoene, derived partly from Il Marescalco, makes the switch a surprising stage trick that culminates a scene of legal satire and comic confusion. Shakespeare, more simply, focuses on the deceivers deceived, on Slender who says in shock and surprise, “she's a great lubberly boy” (V.v.184), and on Caius, who exits for the last time, as we might expect, huffing and puffing, “Ay, be-gar, and 'tis a boy. Be-gar, I'll raise all Windsor” (V.v.209-10).

The Merry Wives of Windsor presents an Italianate appropriation of New Comedic characters, conventions, and plays. Like the errors plays—The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night—it multiplies incident and character into complicated design, romanticizes classical eros, dramatizes mistaken identity. Like the intrigue plays—The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing—Wives focuses on marriage, featuring many tricks and deceits—in Bertrand Evans' judgment, “the greatest accumulation of practices in any play of Shakespeare's except Cymbeline.”²¹ And, like Shrew and Ado, the play exhibits in one of its plots (the wooing of Anne Page) a Plautine romantic configuration that plays off another more eclectic story line. This line, the duping of Falstaff, reprises significant New Comedic elements as well, liberally combining them with other traditions. And yet as always Falstaff finally transcends the classical types he subsumes. Speaking a lively prose much different from the usual Thrasonical huffe-snuffe,²² he narrates the adventure of the buck-basket in hilariously vivid detail and is capable of occasional eironeia—as in, for example, the witty sally he directs at himself:

Quickly:
Alas the day! good heart, that was not her fault.
She does so take on with her men; they mistook their erection.
Falstaff:
So did I mine, to build upon a foolish woman's promise.

(III.v.38-41)

Shakespeare's Wives explores the moral and psychological complexities behind classical comic action. The miles gloriosus here, seen variously in Falstaff, Pistol, and Caius, continually overestimates himself and underestimates others, particularly women. To such delusions the wives apply stringent corrective. Falstaff's cognitio, consequently, differs from the standard classical recognition of identity by token or the neoclassical variant brilliantly exploited in Italian comedy and in Shakespeare himself: the throwing off of disguise or unmasking. Instead, he discovers the folly of his misconceptions, of his evil thinking. The fairies berate him for “sinful fantasy” (V.v.93), the onlookers mock him as “A puff'd man” (l. 152). The processus turbarum illustrates in a comic way the truth of the Garter motto, Honi soit qui mal y pense (V.v.69), “Evil be to him who evil thinks” (italics mine).

Few today would argue that Wives is a seamless success for all of its rambunctious fun. Earlier critics, however, focusing on plot and on the comic unities, thought the play one of Shakespeare's purest comedies. The line of praise includes John Dryden, Nicholas Rowe, and Charles Gildon, and culminates in Samuel Johnson's comment, “perhaps it never yet had reader or spectator who did not think it too soon at an end.”²³ But to our eyes even the plot seems flawed. The revenge on the host, the business with the horses, is badly garbled and, in the present state of the text, entirely extraneous. Nor are Falstaff's subordinates, Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym, well integrated into the action. To be sure they amplify exploration of alazoneia and provide some comic color, but the revenge plot against Falstaff, like Pistol's suit to Mistress Quickly, simply evaporates as the wives take over the play. In fact, Pistol and Nym themselves disappear as the play moves on; they do not reflect on the main action and characters as consistently and tellingly as they do in 2 Henry IV and Henry V. Here Shakespeare works with comic relations and traditions which he will use with greater skill and subtlety in All's Well. There Pistol will reappear as Parolles, and the subordinate miles gloriosus figure will bear a relationship to the action and main characters that is important and purposeful.

Notes

1. Heinrich Plett, ed., Intertextuality (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), pp. 25-26. References to Shakespeare are cited to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974); to Plautus, Comoediae, ed. W.M. Lindsay, Oxford Classical Texts (1904-05; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 2 vols. All translations are mine.

2. The diachronic perspective is discussed and deployed variously by Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982) and The Vulnerable Text (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986); R.J. Schoeck, Intertextuality and Renaissance Texts (Bamberg: H. Kaiser Verlag, 1984); the essayists in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986).

3. See Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 167; Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974), p. 173; Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957-75), II, 9; R.S. Forsythe, “A Plautine Source of The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Modern Philology, 18 (1920), 401-21. Forsythe, however, did not take into account the possibility of intermediation. The feature of three rival suitors, for example, is an Italian innovation already put to good use in TGV and Shrew.

4. That Italian adaptations of New Comedy created the principal family lines for European Renaissance comedy is a proposition long verified and long ignored. Stephen Gosson (Playes Confuted in Five Actions [1582], ed. Arthur Freeman [New York: Garland, 1972], sig. D5v) complained of Italian plays “ransackt, to furnish the Playe houses in London”; Chapman casually mentioned four Italian plays in the dedication to The Widow's Tears. Summarizing past work and reformulating the proposition with erudition and cogency is Louise George Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare's Time (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989).

5. Oscar James Campbell, “The Italianate Background of The Merry Wives of Windsor,” University of Michigan Publications, Language and Literature, 8 (1932), 81-117; Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy, p. 190; see also Clubb, Italian Drama, pp. 24-25.

6. Beatrice M. Corrigan, “Il Capriccio: An Unpublished Italian Renaissance Comedy and its Analogues,” Studies in the Renaissance, 5 (1958), 74-86. These plays engendered others, thus extending the family lines; Dolce's Il Ragazzo, e.g., found new life in Pierre de Larivey's Le Laquais.

7. Lodovico Castelvetro, “Parere di Ludovico Castelvetro sopra ciascuna comedia di Plauto,” ed. Giuseppe Spezi, Il Propugnatore, 1 (1868), 68.

8. Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 160. The play resists the schematic gender readings now in fashion. Backing the suit of Dr. Caius, Mrs. Page, no less than Mr. Page, plays a comic blocking figure whom the young lovers outwit. David O. Frantz (Festum Voluptatis [Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1989], pp. 230-45) discusses the play in the context of Renaissance erotica.

9. Walter E. Forehand, “Plautus' Casina: An Explication,” Arethusa, 6 (1973), 233-56.

10. La Ruchetta (1584), pp. 92, 93, 98.

11. Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, The Birth of Modern Comedy in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 137.

12. See George E. Duckworth, The Nature of Roman Comedy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1952), p. 416; John W. Draper, “Falstaff and the Plautine Parasite,” Classical Journal, 33 (1938), 390-401; Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1954), p. 159: “the discomfited Falstaff of the Merry Wives is far nearer the type of amorous old man of Plautine and Italian comedy than is the more complex Falstaff of the history plays.” Anne Barton (“Falstaff and the Comic Community,” Shakespeare's “Rough Magic,” ed. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn [Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1985], pp. 131-48) finds precedents in Aristophanes.

13. Aside from his earlier incarnation in the history plays, the Windsor Falstaff's most important ancestor is the Italianate Spaniard Armado (see Oscar James Campbell, “Love's Labour's Lost Re-studied,” Univ. of Michigan Publications, Language and Literature, 1 [1925], 3-45). Both soldiers engage in a senex-puer dialogue with a page; both are compared to ancient heroes and mythological figures (LLL I.ii.63ff, 173ff, the show of the Worthies; Wiv. I.iii.6ff). Both pursue unreceptive women by a letter which is derisively read aloud (LLL IV.i; Wiv. II.i). The pursuits culminate in a pageant or “sport,” wherein each suffers exposure and mockery. After the pageant there are some motions of reintegration: Armado vows to “hold the plough” (V.ii.883-84) for Jaquenetta for three years; the abashed Falstaff gets invited to dinner at Page's house (V.v.170-73).

14. Mrs. Page calls him “a Herod of Jewry” (II.i.20), thus evoking the boastful tyrant from the miracle plays. As always, Falstaff exuberantly displays some characteristics of the Vice, the Prodigal Son, and the Lord of Misrule. In addition, several have argued that Falstaff enacts the role of the scapegoat or the central character in folk rituals: Jeanne Addison Roberts, Shakespeare's English Comedy (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979), pp. 77-83; J.A. Bryant, Jr., “Falstaff and the Renewal of Windsor,” PMLA, 89 (1974), 296-301; Anne Parten, “Falstaff's Horns: Masculine Inadequacy and Feminine Mirth in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Studies in Philology, 82 (1985), 184-99.

15. See T.B.L. Webster, Studies in Later Greek Comedy, 2nd ed. (1970; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), p. 64; Andreini, Le bravure (Venice, 1607).

16. Piccolomini, Alessandro (Venice, 1562), p. 36.

17. John Dennis, The Comical Gallant (London, 1702), sig. A2^v. On Boito and Verdi's work, see Gary Schmidgall, Shakespeare and Opera (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 329-30.

18. Corrigan, “Il Capriccio: An Unpublished Italian Renaissance Comedy,” p. 82.

19. Ibid., pp. 82-83; Remy Belleau, La Reconnue, ed. Jean Braybrook (Geneva: Droz, 1989), pp. 10, 15. Corrigan describes another variation, the bawdy Giglietta of Il Capriccio.

20. W.T. MacCary and M.M. Willcock (eds., Casina [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976], p. 37) note that the false bride scene may have been popular in Atellan farce and has a prototype in comic treatments of the marriage of Herakles and Omphale; see also Webster, Studies, p. 161.

21. Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), p. 99.

22. Compare for example the outrageous bluster of Huanebango in Peele's The Old Wives Tale (1595): “Phylyda phylerydos, Pamphylyda floryda flortos, / Dub dub a dub, bounce quoth the guns, with a sulpherous huffe snuffe: / Wakte with a wench, pretty peat, pretty love, and my sweet prettie pigsnie; / Just by thy side shall sit surnamed great Huanebango” (ll. 646-49).

23. See for convenience Brian Vickers, ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974-81), I, 137, 255 (Dryden); II, 195 (Rowe); II, 221 (Gildon); V, 521 (Johnson).